Gadgetory

what kind of uris 2012 it was a big weird scary fun thrilling year of discovery it's been it's been insane like all of tech has kind of changed in the last 12 months I think that we have in the last couple of years in particularly this past year seeing just a total acceptance of technology as an important and obvious part of our culture technology and culture and art and science are all coming together so if we're looking at guys who are hacking their bodies in order to find like a new level of sense if we're looking at for easy to convention you know if we're looking at k-pop fans or if you're talking to Philip a dick fans who've all come together in San Francisco to celebrate the guys work he ultimately what it comes down to is not the technology and it's not the gadgets it's the people behind it camera continues to be a deeply fascinating piece to me because it exposes something that I had no knowledge of I had no understanding of before I read the story that Joe put together what's so incredible about it is that world is so spread out and so insidious and so connected to lots of other pieces of our culture it's a bunch of these guys that are living in kind of a post Tony Robbins world they're basically setting up these sites and these these fake products to prey on the unassuming so we're a lot of this stuff would have been on TV would have been at you know massive conventions like 10 15 years ago a lot of the stuff is now moved online I think it's a story that's important I think reading the comments on that and reading what happened on the web after the story went up and seeing how many people sort of woke up to these guys and their existence and how many people were reviled it was a fascinating trend to watch this is another one of those stories that you've never heard of before and then when you hear if it it sounds like the most insane thing in the world then a writer tells you they're gonna go and get a magnetic planted for their finger Ben's idea was to look at the subculture of people that were pushing limits of human perception we're going to continue to try to bring you the craziest you've ever seen in your life it's the easiest way is just to embed magnets directly into your finger after it heals very able to feel magnetic waves and electrical waves I wouldn't exactly call it science it's more like a mad desire to be a cyborg which is a weird odd crazy thing to want to be whether it's augmentation for human vision or embedded electronics these concepts that have really been in our sci-fi for the past couple decades are increasingly closer to reality I left the internet this year and I do think it was an indictment or Alisa a chance to judge how valuable the internet is to me the question of boredom is very different now and it's very easy to like to push all those buttons and never be bored and it's increasingly difficult to focus on anything and I feel like there's culture wide there's there's a feeling that a lot of this isn't caused by technology and I think what Paul did is pushed it to an extreme where he was forcing himself to focus for a year by completely avoiding an event you've been on the internet for a super long time you're most of your adult life right and you want to write you want to write about like what his life is like without the internet in it yeah this I mean internet fills most of my life and has filled most of my life since I was a teenager and so I don't really know what it's like to be an adult or be in civilization without the internet what we like to look at is not whether technology is good or bad but it's like it's how are people actually using it how is it actually affecting people's day-to-day lives when you think of a computer's I think you have to sit down at it's very different than when it's a computer something you have in your hand all the time that you put in your pocket you know this constant companion and I think that as our minds shift to thinking of Technology in that way as a companion unless as a thing you take action upon that is really significant the things that we think of as pcs this is their last year of like dominance in the industry I think from here on out it's all tablets cell phones cell mobile devices the pc only ever was the primary computing device for a very narrow range one generation smartphones are reaching this maturity whether it's like they're selling them to you like cars got better engines and your your family will be happier and your wife will love you smartphones are the norm it's not weird for somebody to have one now the ownership has skyrocketed so it's obviously become very competitive but it's also stratified you have two players right now in smartphones iOS and Android Windows Phone is trying to get a word in edgewise rim is on a steep decline and so it's interesting to see how quickly people get tired of options all these companies kind of want to have their own isolated experience where it's like this is what Google thinks you want in a phone or a tablet and this is what Apple thinks this is what Amazon face and we're getting increasing the end of that world and I think it's how we're gonna go going forward for a long time we try to find ways to cover an election from angles that I don't think a lot of people have explored technology and the new way that we communicate as human beings played I mean it could be argued that it played the most important role in deciding who won the presidential election in the United States in 2012 which it seems insane to me you know conversations that are happening on social media are now just part of the news and nobody thinks twice about election coverage this year for example was driven a lot my Twitter i watch the debates on Twitter basically and then I would watch the news afterwards and it was news anchors reading what I just seen on Twitter that's sort of thing where the new ways we have of communicating each other are beginning to completely overtake the old ways tracking that story was really an interesting learning experience and really kind of a fascinating rabbit hole to dive into it because it's you kind of politics you could go in a million different directions and there are a million different stories that all seem vitally important this year we saw a lot of the patent wars hit android in the mobile landscape which you expect to happen with any kind of technology sort of explodes into a real industry I think we've seen a lot of our industry get bogged down in legal wrangling when they should be focusing on making great technology that's good for consumers the states may be somewhat high in some of these cases but ultimately they're they're not table stakes for these large companies there's a lot of open questions about what kind of inventions we want to protect we want to issue patents and let people see each other for things like slide on long do we want to waste our time in the courts letting these companies argue over smartphones when I should be making better better smartphones and trying to win the war in the market place inside the courtroom I don't know if any of these companies are looking at it going this is the way forward there are politics at play but there's also actual negotiations happen and I think that's really valuable and important if we expect to have any innovation in technology some of these things you can't just hold on to in perpetuity you have to be able and willing to share what you've created with the world for me it's been really important to try to put into perspective how much technology really matters and how much my obsession over technology is healthy and useful versus just done for its own sake I do hope that that as going forward we're going to look at the internet and start picking and choosing and not let the internet dictate to us how it wants to be used it's such an early young technology that it's really still a wild west and I look forward to a maturation of the internet it seems like everything changes kind of all at once and then it changes again then changed again we're in these funny like waves of crazy technology happenings we're just at this crazy pace of like everything is different and better all the time as well for the last few years there's been a huge boom in types of devices and form factors but I think that's going to wear off pretty quickly and people are gonna start to think of what is the best way for me to interact with the stuff where is the best place for it to be what is the best size screen that actually makes sense for a human being now that we know we're going to live with technology think it'll be a year of us figuring out how to live with technology